I apologize for the recent down-time - I contacted Dreamhost about it and just received this reply:

I looked into the issue and there was a problem with the permissions on
the server. I corrected this for you and everything is working fine now!
If there is anything else you need help with, please let me know! Thanks!
Have a great day!

Anthony S
DreamHost Support

It looks like whatever they did worked, as BGDF is back up and running again! I'll delay posting the BGDF winner so that people who tried to vote and weren't able to log in can do so!

November 2011 Game Design Showdown - "Oceans Elevens"

Results are in!

Congratulations to the winner, Brian Andrew (Argebie) with his entry Pistols and Planks. He received eight total medals, four of them gold, the highest number for both counts, for a total medal score of 32 points. DogBoy's Commutiny on the Bounty took second with four medals, three of them gold, for 19 points. Full results are posted in the Critiques thread. All BGDFers (and particularly the participants) are encouraged to post critiques of the game submissions there.

VOTING IS NOW OPEN.

Submit your top three picks to dobnarr. Be sure to read about the changes in voting this month below:

Showdown Voting Change:

For this month only, I'm trying out a new voting mechanism for the Showdown. Rules are as follows:

Instead of allocating six votes, each voter instead awards three medals to the three submissions he/she considers the best entries, allocating them as 1st place Gold, 2nd Silver, and 3rd Bronze. When awarding medals, voters should take into account showdown rules and the theme and mechanic limitations in addition to game design.

For purposes of winning the showdown, Gold counts as 6 points, Silver 3 points, Bronze 1 point. Highest total points from all medals received wins the showdown.

Contestants are strongly encouraged to vote. Contestants cannot award medals to their own submitted games. Contestants who enter a game in the showdown but don't vote for other games are awarded an Arsenic medal worth negative ten points to balance out the ten points they failed to grant to competitors.

October 2011 Game Design Showdown - "Rest In Peace"

The votes are in, and we have a winner!

The October installment of the Game Design Showdown is now over.

This month we had 10 entrants, but only 7 voters. I think it would be cool (and maybe even more fair) if each entrant took the time to vote on the entries. Please keep that in mind - if you expect other participants to read and vote on your entry, do them the favor of reading and voting on theirs.

This month's winner, with 7 votes, is Graveyard Shift by Ilta (Isaiah Tanenbaum)!
A close second, with 5 votes, is Zombie Ball by dobnarr (Dave Dobson).

Grave Spotting, Attack of the really long game title, Dorn Bones, and Bone Pile each received 4 votes. Good job everyone! The Critiques Thread is now open for business!

Main Design Requirements:

Theme (or Setting) Restriction: Final resting place (or... "Dying to get in").
In honor of Halloween, this month's games should be about or set in a final resting place - mortuaries, graveyards, catacombs, shallow graves, whatever you like.

Mechanics Restriction: "Dorn tower" or "Mancala".
A neat mechanism I haven't seen used in a while is the "Dorn tower" - a mechanism used by Rudiger Dorn in several of his games: Genoa, Louis XIV and Goa to name a few. This mechanism is pretty similar to the main mechanism in Mancala. For a better description of this mechanism you may want to check out reviews of those games if you're not already familiar with them.

September 2011 Game Design Showdown - "Stick Around"

We have a winner!

With 6 votes, the winner of the September GDS is Over There.
Runners up with 5 votes each: Last Bot Standing and Nations of the World.
Wheel of History, Gods and Heroes, and Shootout at El Tiroteo finished with 4, 3, and 2 votes, respectively.

Congrats to the winner and runners up (close one this time)! The critique thread is now open.

Main Design Requirements:

Component Restriction: Permanence
One of the fundamental aspects of board games nowadays is that they start out the same way every time. This year Hasbro released Risk Legacy, a game in which game state information is permanently recorded, making subsequent plays fundamentally different than the last.

This month's challenge is to create a game which incorporates such permanent changes to some or all of its components, allowing the game world to grow or change from play to play.

Apparently I (a) had a bad link in the GDS thread, and (b) failed to unlock the critiques thread when I tried to...

Both of those errors have been fixed now.

Also, becuase of Gen Con and other basic business, I was late to post this month's and last month's GDS challenges. I fear this may have contributed to low participation, and I apologize for that. You can expect the September GDS to go up on the 1st or 2nd (Thursday or Friday) as per the new schedule!

August 2011 Game Design Showdown - "Convention Fever"

The August Game Design Showdown is now over! The votes are in!

Not a lot of participation this month - I blame myself for that as I posted it late, and it was right on the tail of last months (which also ran late)... We had 3 entries this month, and only 3 people voted. The winner with 3 votes was SwagCon, by Wil Wade. Congrats Wil!

Shamble-Con by loonoly received 2 votes, and ZombieCon by Benj Hamilton (Yamahako) received 1 vote.

We at The Game Crafter are pleased to announce our first of many design contests. Each will have a theme, and a short set of rules. After that it's all up to your creativity to see what happens.
There are many different kinds of vehicles in our parts catalog. For our first contest we want you to design a game that features one or more of the vehicle parts in our parts catalog. It doesn't matter whether you feature just one kind of vehicle (like a boat racing game), or if you create a game that requires a whole horde of different vehicles (like a military strategy game).